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Seeking a Political Accommodation

The Ulster Volunteer Force: Negotiating History.

Roy Garland. A Shankill
Community Publication, 1997. £1.50.

The author of this pamphlet is an Ulster Unionist councillor on Lisburn
Borough Council. Mr Garland is a member of the Shankill Think Tank and a regular
columnist in the Irish News. He explains in his preface that when the troubles
started he was an evangelical Protestant and high up in the Unionist Party and
the Orange Order. Today he is a well-known spokesman for the liberal wing of the
UUP and a further education lecturer in sociology, religion and politics. He is
‘happy’ to be a ‘positive’ Protestant with an Ulster identity and UK
citizenship but he also rejoices ‘that I have found a means to reflect and
enjoy my Irishness.’

This is an interesting clue that Councillor Garland has not entirely rejected
his own roots. Mr Garland neglected to mention in his preface that he first
found a means to ‘reflect and enjoy’ his ‘Irishness’ when he was
second-in-command of Tara - an evangelical Protestant paramilitary group with a
strong ‘Irish emphasis’ - which took its name from the seat of the
ceremonial High Kings of Ireland.

Although there have been many books written about the IRA and its history
very few have dealt with the history of the loyalist paramilitary groups. Steve Bruce
has written two useful studies, The Red Hand and At the Edge of the Union.
Ulster’s Uncertain defenders, the only other study, appeared a decade earlier
in 1984. The last book on the UVF was published in 1973!

This concise booklet is an edited version of an earlier dissertation for a
university degree, The UVF: Negotiating Identity. This has been serialised in
Progressive View, the journal of the Progressive Unionist Party. Would-be
readers can be thankful that this booklet has been heavily abridged. The
unreadable purple prose and tortuous sociological jargon which marred the
original has been eliminated.

Mr Garland takes us from the foundation of the modern UVF in the mid-sixties
up to 1976. A short appendix looks at the situation from 1991 to the present
day. This work looks largely through the eyes of Gusty Spence, the UVF’s
veteran political guru. Spence claims that the UVF was set up by rightwing
elements of the Unionist Party to undermine Terence O’Neill, the Prime
Minister. O’Neill banned it under the Special Powers Act after two brutal
murders in May 1966. Spence and two others were convicted of these killings.

Garland traces the growth of the UVF after the outbreak of the present
troubles and its short-lived relationship with Tara. This broke down in a welter
of mutual recriminations and bitterness after 1971. Garland observes that the
Shankill UVF were working class men who - unlike Tara - did not see themselves
as fighting a religious war, but as ‘serving Ulster’. He quotes Spence in
support of his belief, that nevertheless, this did mean that the organisation was fighting Catholics. In their efforts to strike back at the IRA,
‘If it
wasn’t possible to get at the IRA then some thought “we’ll get those who
are harbouring them, succouring them, comforting them and supporting them” - a
completely erroneous theory.’ This pamphlet largely ignores the UVF’s
military activities and killings and concentrates on the organisation's attempts in the mid-seventies to find a political rôle for itself.

The supporters of the UVF resented their portrayal in the media as a ‘privileged’
community. As Spence observed, very few working-class Protestants were
politically aware, and they felt helpless in the face of constant attacks and misrepresentations
in the media. Spence and others found time to reflect on all
these things in prison. ‘We had seminars on everything... The men were ready,
not for indoctrination, but to be set in pursuit not only of truth but of some
form of political ideology.’ Similar soul-searching was taking place inside
the UVF outside the prisons. In the UDA, a parallel debate led to that
organisation espousing negotiated independence for Ulster as a means to transcend
the religious divide and offer a common focus of allegiance for the communities.

In the UVF, Garland argues that the ‘concensus seemed to favour
conciliation, and a form of Democratic Socialism which retained the link with
the United Kingdom.’ This is partly true, but it was also open to other more
radical opinions. The first political group to speak for the UVF was the Ulster
Loyalist Front in 1973. Some of the material which emanated from that source was
very positive. ‘Its policies included a “return to democracy” and
increased use of referenda, workers’ partnership schemes, and although in
favour of private enterprise it wanted to curb “international monopoly
capitalism”.’ Despite what Garland seems to think, this talk was not socialist
but was common at that time in the radical Britain First wing of the
National Front. Indeed, articles from NF publications were occasionally
reprinted in the UVF’s journal Combat.

The UVF’s first foray into politics ended in failure with a violent
resumption of bombings and killings in October 1975. Garland puts this down to
an apparently all-embracing conspiracy between Tara, rightwing unionist
politicians, the RUC and the British security services to destroy ‘the
independent and Socialist thinking of working-class Loyalists.’ There is no
doubt that the UVF did come under a lot of criticism at that time but it often
gave as good as it got in reply. The simple truth is more likely that loyalist
voters seemed to have decided that politicians do politics and paramilitants do
war. However, Ken Gibson’s statement in 1974 that ‘organisations such as the
UVF will no longer allow themselves to be used by politicians who will not
listen to their views’ set out an attitude that has remained constant in the
UVF and UFF ever since.

There can be no doubt that traditional unionism is a dead doctrine and it
needs to be swept aside if our Ulster homeland is to survive, let alone thrive.
In this, Garland, Spence and the ‘new thinkers’ in the UVF of the
mid-seventies were spot-on. It is a shame that they chose the blind alley of
socialism. Socialism promises much but delivers equality of impoverishment to
all except the party oligarchy.

The New Ulster Political Research Group were much nearer the mark in 1979
when they advocated an independent Ulster with social justice for all. Spence is
right. Ulsterfolk do need to be guided by some form of political ideology. That
ideology ought not to be socialism - which is just as much a reactionary
dead-end as traditional unionism - but radical Ulster-nationalism. Mr Garland, who
is a liberal-leftist member of the UUP, will probably never admit this, but
perhaps some of the people he has written about will. That said, buy this book.
It’s well worth £1.50. Copies are available from Clancy’s Bookshop, The
Haymarket, 16 Gresham Street, Belfast BT1 1JN.